Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in United StatesSergio Vega

Sergio Vega: Series Parrot Color Charts

Sergio VegaUNITED STATESMIAMI, FLORIDA • KaBe Contemporary • Ongoing

The works of Sergio Vega are best understood in the context of what Paulo Herkenhoff defines as "the inexistent plausible." This term indicates that the very nature of the work is to be entirely hypothetical, yet persuasive in its plausibility. In the case of Sergio Vega's work, his hypotheses furnish a plausible reality: that of "Latin American Art."

The series Parrot color charts involves photographs of parrots cropped and presented as sources of colors. Cloned from individual pixels in the photographs these colors are reproduced in the adjacent geometric planes that make up the grid composition. This tautological relationship between referent (photo) and signifier (color) could be equivalent to exhibiting a painting and along with it, the paint tubes, the palette and the brushes used to mix the colors that went into the making of the painting. In addition, the visual harmony created by the color scheme and the contiguity of photographic image along with non­representational abstract form point to a paradoxical impossibility of translation. The artist sustains that: "Based on Roland Barthes' assertion that photography is a message without a code, the unavoidable result of abstraction would be to produce a code without a message."